Our waterways are in crisis. Only about 1% of Ireland’s rivers and streams are pristine; down from nearly 15% in the 1980s. Despite a legal obligation to achieve “good” status for our waterways by 2027, we’ve hovered around only 55% of waterways at this status since 1987. The targets aren’t just to keep within EU law; they are essential to rebuilding habitat for vulnerable aquatic wildlife and for helping support Irish biodiversity and for our own water quality needs.
So if we’ve tried for nearly 30 years to achieve improvements in water quality with essentially zero success, why should we try now? Well, there has been a sea change in our attitude to the natural world. We are seeing greater engagement than ever before in the interwoven areas of biodiversity, climate action and water quality. There is also funding for creating change in these areas that simply has not been prioritised up until now. There has never been a better time to stand up and take action for water quality at every level and scale.
What we need is a miracle. Specifically a miraculous shift in values and priorities; and the budgets and local action to support them. With this in mind, change is completely within our grasp.
In order to achieve “good” status (Q4 on an improving scale of 1 to 5) the following areas need urgent attention at every level:
- Sewage and industrial effluents
- Stormwater
- Farming
- Forestry
- Hydromorphology
- Policy
- Global considerations
Imagine if we prioritised water for each of the above areas:
- By embracing nutrient cycling and excellent treatment standards, pollution by sewage and industrial effluents would simply be a thing of the past.
- No stormwater would flow from streets, roads or yards without first passing through a planted natural filter system, providing habitat, improving water quality reducing flooding and storing carbon.
- Farming would use water quality as a metric of success, seeing that food growing and ecological recovery can go hand in hand.
- Forestry likewise would shift to continuous cover forestry practices that actively support nature, carbon storage, water protections and economic diversity of this sector.
- River channels would flow freely again as we remove unused dams and weirs; channel drainage would take account of biodiversity and water filtration freely offered by recovering plant growth and become richer in wildlife and more effective at their natural flood/drought resilience measures.
- Policy would shift to actively reward the benefits across every one of the above, providing a monetary reward for doing the right thing rather than the usual thing, and would remove obstacles to forward movement, instead actively helping to shift the changes forward that we need to see.
- As global citizens we would recognise the impact of our purchases, supply chains and food web around the planet and would buy with as much care for people and water far away as we would for people and water living in our own communities.
All these things should be relatively straightforward to implement across the country immediately, with sufficient political will and with a careful communication process to ensure that local communities are able to fully participate in the progress being made and that potential concerns are addressed early on. Buy-in is critical to any large process of change, so the measures will need to be discussed and agreed with the personnel involved (home owners, farmers, foresters, state and semi-state bodies) and there should be built-in scope for exceptions based on specific circumstances in all cases.
This website shows a map to the practical changes that can be made for each of the items raised above. This is by no means complete, and should be regarded as a work in progress – but it is intended as a useful tool for home owners, farmers, local communities, businesses, local authorities and state bodies for achieving the miracle of good water quality in all our rivers and streams in record time.
There will be more blog posts to follow this one, focusing on individual aspects of the required miracle and how we can help to bring it into being – cleaner water for ourselves and for future generations. To begin with, check out our post Five things you can do for your water – and your world